Once united by a shared mission to make AI safe for humanity, Sam Altman and Elon Musk are now locked in one of the fiercest rivalries Silicon Valley has seen.
The two men co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to responsible AI research, with Musk contributing $44 million and serving as the organization’s largest backer. He left the board in 2018 after a failed attempt to merge OpenAI into Tesla, but at the time their relationship still seemed cordial. Altman once warned that “betting against Elon is historically a mistake,” while Musk praised ChatGPT as “scary good” when it launched in 2022.
That goodwill did not last. By 2023, Musk was promoting xAI as an “anti-woke” alternative to OpenAI, while mocking ChatGPT as “insufferable” and infected by the “woke mind virus.” He criticized Altman during a short-lived coup at OpenAI, warning that “human civilization is at stake” if his rival remained in charge. Altman, for his part, began speaking more openly about Musk’s character, saying Musk “can’t be a happy person” and that his “whole life is from a position of insecurity.”
The feud intensified in 2024 when Musk launched a $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI’s assets, even though they weren’t for sale. He then sued Altman and cofounder Greg Brockman, arguing that OpenAI’s move toward a for-profit model betrayed its founding mission. OpenAI countersued in 2025, accusing Musk of a “yearslong harassment campaign” and calling his bid a “sham” designed to damage the company. A federal jury trial is now scheduled for next year.
The war between them, however, extends well beyond the courtroom. Altman has been building or funding ventures that compete directly with Musk’s businesses. He co-founded Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface company valued at $850 million, which aims to rival Musk’s own Neuralink, recently valued at $9 billion. In an ironic twist, Altman is also a small investor in Neuralink. He is also positioning OpenAI to move into social networking with plans for an “X-like” platform, a potential threat to Musk’s X, which currently has around 600 million monthly users. ChatGPT, Altman likes to point out, already attracts 700 million weekly users.
The rivalry extends to the auto industry as well. Tesla’s sales fell 13.5% in the second quarter of 2025, prompting Musk to pin hopes on a future fleet of self-driving taxis. “My prediction is by the end of next year, we’ll have hundreds of thousands if not over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the U.S,” Musk claimed earlier this year. But OpenAI has partnered with Applied Intuition, a self-driving software firm valued at $15 billion, and Altman has hinted that his company’s approach to autonomy could surpass Tesla’s. “We have some new technology that could just do self-driving for standard cars way better than any current approach has worked,” he boasted on his brother’s podcast.
Even the space race is not safe from their rivalry. Altman has invested in Longshot Space, a company with the outlandish goal of shooting satellites into orbit with a gigantic gun, and in Glydways, another startup exploring autonomous vehicles that could one day compete with Tesla’s robotaxis. These bets reflect Altman’s growing interest in encroaching on Musk’s strongest domains: space exploration and electric cars.
For outsiders, the spectacle is as entertaining as it is consequential. The insults have become sharper. Musk now refers to Altman as “Scam Altman” and “Swindly Sam,” while Altman accuses Musk of manipulating X to “benefit himself and his own companies.” Musk’s response was blunt: “liar.”